A Piece of Dignity Page 1

Air Raid Robertson on April 2, 2012

I decided to shelve the one-off strip and just dive into the next storyline. As you have hopefully ascertained, this tale is about Ridley when he's a young man. It serves as the prologue to a larger story.

You've also probably noticed that everything here is colored in red and orange. One of my favorite film directors is Zhang Yimou and one of my favorite aspects of his work is the excellent use of color. Yimou's eye for color is exceptional and he always makes it an integral aspect of the storytelling in his films. My fondness for his work has made mevery interested in using color as a narrative devicein comics. This plot seemed like a good venue to do so.

The title of this story was inspired by JackLondon's“A Piece of Steak”. This short story is about a middle-aged boxer who is desperately fighting a much younger opponent in the vain hope ofproviding forhis family. I first read it while I was laid up in the hospital at the age of eighteen and it absolutely broke my adolescent heart. Many of the frames in this story areswiped from an attempt I madeto adapt “A Piece of Steak” to a comic book story. It seemed fitting for me to make the title of this yarn a reference point to London's still-underrated body of work.